Tag Archive: Honda Tsubasa

This is the final episode of Ando Lloyd (安堂ロイド〜A.I. knows LOVE?〜) and frankly, nothing that’s going to happen here is going to make up for my disappointment in the series. I’m a Kimura Takuya fan and a science fiction fan, but neither was very well represented in this drama.

But let me save all that for the end. Can this episode at least provide 46 minutes of solid entertainment?

We last left the android Lloyd (Kimura Takuya) in what will presumably be his final confrontation against his sister robot, the ARX-IX (Kiritani Mirei), after she has killed the prime minister. I expressed a lot of frustration in the episode 9 review because very little makes sense anymore. The writers are trying to get away with too much without connecting the dots for the viewers. They haven’t even tried to attribute any sort of plan to the ARX-IX, and her character lacks any sort of coherent motive. She’s just evil for the sake of being evil.

Oh, and then even though the prime minister is already dead, Suppli is somehow able to bring him back to life. Granted, there’s advanced technology and everything, but that’s not the point. The point is that at the end of episode 9 they seemed to kill off Nanase (Oshima Yuko), Isaku (Endo Kenichi), and Shinzo (Kiritani Kenta), and that was quite a shock – but only because we hadn’t been told Suppli could bring them back to life. In the end, it amounted to the writers playing a pointless trick on the viewer, since the deaths didn’t serve any purpose, and this particular viewer is not amused.

All right, back to the fight between the two ARXs. Now, The ARX-IX has the Asura system boost, but Lloyd doesn’t have any more of those, so he’s at a disadvantage. Good thing she wants to toy with him.

It’s an extremely well-choreographed fight compared to the others we’ve seen in this series, and it’s a lot of fun watching the schoolgirl-looking ARX-IX beat up on her older brother. Suppli and Asahi (Shibasaki Kou) watch from Suppli’s super-high-tech inter-dimensional hospital room (just guessing here because it’s not like they’ve ever bothered to say anything about it) and despair as they see the ARX-IX winning.

The beginning of this episode of Ando Lloyd (安堂ロイド〜A.I. knows LOVE?〜) takes us back to the day after Matsushima Reiji (Kimura Takuya) was killed, when Matsushima Nanase (Oshima Yuko) first met the Mysterious Beauty (Kiritani Mirei). We wondered why Nanase seemed already so familiar with the Android Queen (as I might start calling her), and it turns out she met it at the same time as Asahi (Shibasaki Kou) met Lloyd (Kimura Takuya).

But that sequence is just Nanase’s memory – she wakes up in the present in a hospital bed tied down. The psychiatrists think that she has multiple personality disorder, and one of those personalities is violent. I suspect that it’s just the Mysterious Beauty’s influence on her.

The Android Queen has modified Nanase’s glasses to play video, and uses it to show Nanase what she has done.

The psychological conditioning continues as the Android Queen forces Nanase to switch to the personality that I think the android created.

That violent alternate personality then goes on a bloody rampage to escape the hospital/psych ward. Some brilliant crazed acting from Oshima-san, by the way – this whole issue of her transformation into a demon under the control of the Android Queen is the most remarkable plot in this series so far.

The previous episode of Ando Lloyd (安堂ロイド〜A.I. knows LOVE?〜) concluded with a bit of a surprise – Shinzo (Kiritani Kenta)’s attempt to revive Lloyd (Kimura Takuya) resulted in the android losing his memory – putting him back in the same state as in the first episode. That’s an interesting turn of events if they do something with it, but it’s unclear how much of his memory he’s lost. For instance, he seems able to access his mission to protect Asahi, he knows he’s in 2013, and he knows he’s supposed to kill anyone who finds out about him. Does he remember that he took justice into his own hands to kill the masterminds of a mass murder plot?

Asahi (Shibasaki Kou) is convinced that she can keep Lloyd from killing Shinzo and Isaku (Endo Kenichi) despite Lloyd’s programming, and that’s a fair assumption since she kept him from killing them and Nanase (Oshima Yuko) before. Whoever programmed Lloyd sure allowed for a lot of flexibility.

After deciding not to kill them, though, Lloyd disappears. It’s unclear yet whether he’s still got his emotions or not – let’s face it, even when Suppli (Honda Tsubasa) installed emotions into him, he hardly changed at all.

At the end of the last episode of Ando Lloyd (安堂ロイド〜A.I. knows LOVE?〜), Lloyd (Kimura Takuya) faced off against three androids and survived by defeating one of them while the other two stood around and then . . . I think the other two just got intimidated and fled. Either that or Lloyd somehow forced them to retreat. I didn’t really understand it, but the implication was that Lloyd suddenly got some super powers – more super than the powers he already had, though we hardly had any sense of the limits of that.

The downside to becoming Super Lloyd is that the exertion forced his system to shut down.

Isaku (Endo Kenichi) helps Asahi (Shibasaki Kou) take care of Lloyd, after having assessed Lloyd’s character during their confrontation in the last episode. Just the fact that Lloyd could have killed him but didn’t has impressed Isaku.

We discover at the beginning of this episode of Ando Lloyd (安堂ロイド~A.I. knows LOVE?~) that the recent demise of Sapuri (*sniff*) means that Lloyd (Kimura Takuya) can no longer replace his parts and has to take greater care. Seems like another step to him being human, now that he’s also acquired emotions (not that he’s particularly good about showing them at the moment).

Shinzo (Kiritani Kenta) becomes Isaku (Endo Kenichi)’s partner. Well, he can’t possibly be worse than the last guy, though Isaku warns him that he’s probably going to die.

Shinzo’s motives seem to me unclear. Is he really doing all this just to protect Asahi (Shibasaki Kou)?